Birmingham: A Sense of Place was a collaboration between WLPG and the Festival Symposium strand, curated by Emelie Fitzgibbon and Philip Hardy of Ireland - a part of the On the Edge Festival, the ASSITEJ Artistic Gathering, Birmingham, July 2016.

The creative exercise was to write based on a reaction to something or someone in this wonderful city. The Symposium team created interesting maps of five different routes, and the writers were asked to go there and write in reaction. All the pieces were written in the four days before the public reading on July 8, 2016.

Click HERE to see a gallery of the photos of the places the writers travelled to, as well as some shots of the readings at the Birmingham Rep Mezzanine

Special thanks for this idea to Tony Mack of Australia, who was on the EC and a VP from 2002-2008 and is one of WLPG's co-editors. His thoughts:

After years travelling with the EC, I grew to love seeing cities through the eyes of people from different cultures. They always saw things that I didn’t. Made sense that writers would be able to heighten that experience even more in their different creative voices and languages, and I wondered whether it could even be seen as a tribute to the city and the local people organising the festival.

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The writing challenges can train the students well. And these challenges are practical for everyone, because they have to be fluent in English language. And they should take their career start from their colleges and the university levels.